Word: pregnantly
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...babble of the actors' voices comes a piercing wail. Larissa, her three-week-old daughter, is hungry. In an adjacent bedroom, Joey, l l/2 years old and recovering from the flu, starts to stir. Stephanie, who is an American Indian and one of ten children herself, first became pregnant at 15. It was an "accident," she explains. So too was her second baby. "I'm always tired," she laments, "and I can't eat." Before Joey's birth, before she dropped out of school, Stephanie dreamed of being a stewardess. Now her aspirations are more down-to-earth. "I want...
They are of different races, from different places, but their tales and laments have a haunting sameness. Each year more than a million American teenagers will become pregnant, four out of five of them unmarried. Together they represent a distressing flaw in the social fabric of America. Like Angela, Michelle and Stephanie, many become pregnant in their early or mid-teens, some 30,000 of them under age 15. If present trends continue, researchers estimate, fully 40% of today's 14-year-old girls will be pregnant at least once before the age of 20. Says Sally...
...Mass., an old mill town where unemployment has been high, teen pregnancy is reaching epidemic levels. One out of five births at North Adams Regional Hospital is to an adolescent, and 90% of the young mothers wind up on welfare. "I'm seeing a world where kids feel being pregnant is a viable option," sighs Maggie Bitman, who runs a parenting program in North Adams. "They feel their lives are in disarray." The situation is similar in the mostly white, down-at-the-heels southern counties of Illinois, and in white, working-class areas where the work has disappeared...
...Hopes of escaping a dreary existence, of finding direction and purpose, generally sink in a sea of responsibility. With no one to watch the child, school becomes impossible, if not irrelevant. And despite the harsh lessons of experience, many remain careless or indifferent about birth control. About 15% of pregnant teens become pregnant again within one year; 30% do so within two years. "You ask, 'Why didn't you come in for the Pill?' and they say, 'I didn't have time,' " says an exasperated Kay Bard of Planned Parenthood in Atlanta. "Their lives begin to spiral out of control...
...second the following year. Her elder son Eddie has a learning disability and was almost autistic as an infant. Bell, who has managed heroically to complete high school and secure a good job with the city, blames herself for his problems. "I hated the fact that I was pregnant," she recalls. "I was resentful of my unborn child. I used to punch myself in the stomach. Poor Eddie," she muses, "the first year I wouldn't play with him. He didn't talk until he was nearly two; he would just grunt. I would say, I traumatized...